Making font design fun

Why do you want to use Fontographer?

For the fun of it!

When I received the opportunity to go back to my roots, and see what the new Fontographer was like, I was a little concerned. I had just spent nine years painfully teaching myself to letterspace by hand, to write OpenType features, and to become accustomed to the tool set of FontLab. Don’t get me wrong, FontLab is a great program and I am grateful for what I have learned. There are still a few features of FontLab that, as a professional font designer, I cannot do without. But I was taken by surprise.

Fontographer 5.1 brings the fun back!

It is still the same marvelous program with which I first learned to design fonts. The drawing interface is still clean, clear, and elegant. I still works the way I have learned to work over the past two decades of digital graphic design. I found pure joy in drawing again. Fontographer is a wonderful drawing experience. It has been a real joy to experience that fun again. After nearly a decade in FontLab, font design is fun again.

To quote from the book:

“Fontographer is an application which appeals to experienced graphics designers with a background in PostScript illustration… The majority of designers working in the mid-1990s had a copy of Fontographer…and everyone probably used it [at least a little].

Fontographer had [and still has] a unique and intuitive set of drawing tools that enable amateurs of that era to enter the world of font design. I’m talking amateurs in the sense that John Baskerville considered himself an amateur—as I also consider myself, though I am certainly not in Baskerville’s league. For me, font design is a beloved sideline with which I indulge myself. It’s become a treasured tool I use in my current trade—book writing, designing, and production.”

The first version out is a spiral-bound workbook

The normal 6×9 book is presented at almost 7.5″ x 10″ giving you large margins for notes. This spiral-bound version is great for use while designing your first fonts at the computer.

7.44″ by 9.7″, 230 pages. only $19.95

Related articles

• The key role of Fontographer in the font revolution (bergsland.org)
• 1st public release: Practical Font Design For Graphic Designers: Fontographer 5.1 (bergsland.org)
• Fontographer or FontLab? (hackberry-fonts.com)
• Why I switched back to Fontographer 5.1 (bergsland.org)